It was the first book I started reading I could not put down until the end. Gained a lot of appreciation for literature at that time.

The other book that I enjoyed and changed me was ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan Watts. I was a fan of Alan Watts works through his lectures already and it was wonderful to hear his ideas in writing for the first time.

The book is available to read for free online (https://antilogicalism.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/wisdom-of...).

I wish everyone read or watched Alan Watts lectures and books. The world would be a much nicer place if that was the case.

My favorite quote is by him:

‘We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.’

It was the first time I realized books could be dangerous, subversive, and truly educational as well as simply informative or entertaining.

* The Dictator’s Handbook. One simple axiom - leaders do what is necessary to stay in power. Using that idea they explain the basis of all political systems, whether autocracy or democracy or somewhere in between. I didn’t really understand politics before I read this. CGPGrey has a video where he summarises the book. [1]

* (Only for Indians) India After Gandhi. You can’t really understand your country if you don’t know it’s history. History stopped in 1947 according to our history books, and most people are blissfully unaware of what came after. They don’t know how close India came to losing democracy or how easily it could happen again. They don’t understand the dangers of promoting one language at the expense of others because they don’t know that it’s been tried before. Every Indian needs to know so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past over and over.

[1] - https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

Not so much for the tidying part (though I did find that extremely helpful), but the whole idea of only keeping things in your life that "spark joy" (not an exact translation by the way - "spark excitement" or "spark meaning" are other ways I like to think about it) has had a profound impact on me.

I realized there were lots of things in my life (much more than just physical objects) that I had just sort of accumulated without thinking about what I really like or if something was good for me. I found the benefit of "practicing" this concept without mundane household objects allowed me to have a stronger sense of what I really enjoy in the more important aspects of my life.

Now I see muda everywhere and cringe when I overhear people talking about applying kaizen and how they think they're practicing "continuous improvement" while repeating the same rote, industrial, mindless processes that they have been for the last 40 years. We can do so much better. Toyota tried very hard to teach GM how at their NUMMI[1] plant, but it wasn't the right location relative to their suppliers for JIT to fully work and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

[0] https://www.lean.org/Bookstore/ProductDetails.cfm?SelectedPr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI

Bottom line: judge your success in life by how well you make your decisions, not by your outcome. You have full control of your decisions, and often no control at all over their results.

There is no better book on the philosophy of UX, imho.

* Thinking Fast and Slow - study after study shows that we exhibit so, so many cognitive biases, as our minds take shortcuts. there are some things you can do to recognize and mitigate these biases.

* Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...

Frankly, it made me aware that I was being an asshole and that I should change.

However, it wasn't necessarily the book, but the course that I found really useful.

Hands down the book that most influenced me. The book had (for me) not one but several simple-yet-profound ideas that were forever inserted into the foreground of how I make sense of the world. For example, the existence of shared myths that allow humans to cooperate on a large scale. Or how I too, am religious, though I was sure I wasn't.

Can't recommend it enough.

Recently, Educated by Tara Westover, and in the past The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, both have taught me to approach individuals with the true ignorance of their lives that I have. You don't know where people come from and what life led them to where they are when you meet them. Try not to make assumptions. Additionally, I have to remind myself that I grew up loved, cared for, and privileged compared to so many other people.. the fact that I could read their story and post here is a testament to that, helps me try to stay down to Earth and that I had some advantages growing up that others did not.

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker... I used to be a chronic advocate for sleeping less until I read this and did my own scrappy post-research. I'm much more conscious of my health and my sleep now.

I could go on and on..

I realized that my bad relationships are mostly the result of my lack of skin in the game. That indifference is not an advantage but that it is paralyzing.

That I have to feel to be able to risk and do something.

In addition to applying the concept of antifragility to many external things.

It has motivated me to start a business and to connect more with my loved ones, changed my perspective on research, what's important and the power of the passing of time. It definitely impacted my life.

Very first: The Song of Wandering Aengus, by William Butler Yeats. I read this when I was six or so. I found it as an illustrated children's book in children's section of the public library of the very small rural town. Someone decided this very adult poem, about an old man who wasted his life chasing an unattainable magic dream, was a good children's story. It introduced me to the idea that poems and stories could express sadness and failure and other negative feelings, not just the happy silly stuff of the other age-appropriate things I read.

"Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows changed how I approached designing/troubleshooting software systems as well as changed how I think about political policy decisions and their results.

"Object Thinking" by David West dramatically altered how I approach designing OO systems. I especially liked the chapter(s) where he used different real-world metaphors for designing systems. For example, asynchronous communication (email) is often more appropriate than synchronous communication (calling someone on the phone). Delegation of tasks without "micromanaging" (i.e tell don't ask).

"Ever Wonder Why?" by Thomas Sowell gave me an insight into some of the underpinnings of Conservative thought. I'd never had the opportunity to hear any of the arguments he brings up in college or in my own liberal social groups.

-Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hosfstadter)

-The Mindbody Prescription (John E. Sarno, completely cured my long-term crippling RSI that kept me from using computers and was ruining my life)

-Feeling Good (Dr. Burns, cognitive therapy mostly centered on depression, but I want to learn about this before I have depression so that I can avoid it and do 'maintenance' on myself)

-The 5 Love Languages (Gary Chapman, made me understand a lot more about how people express and receive love, and the problems that arise from mismatched languages in relationships)

-Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman (you guys probably already know this)

-The Blank Slate (Steven Pinker)

-The Snowball (Warren Buffett biography)

-Influence (Robert B. Cialdini)

-Your Money or Your Life (Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin)

-When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace (Le Ly Hayslip)

-The Halo Effect (Phil Rosenzweig)

-The LessWrong.com sequences on rationality

Access to scarce resources induces a particular scarcity mindset, which the authors -- both behavioural economists at Harvard and MIT respectively -- show with a large variety of well-chosen examples.

The kicker is that time is one of those resources. In other words, I may be economically well-off, but if I'm short of time, I adopt the same scarce mindset that poor people (poor in money terms). I fritter away my time, I don't save it and so on. This book really showed me to deal with my time as carefully as I deal with my money. Great read, of the Freakonomics kind.

Edit: also Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. It’s slim and user friendly to a fault, and would be easy to underestimate at first glance, but imho contains great wisdom and beauty.

After I read it, I felt like I could see the world for what it really is: just a bunch of fallible humans all pretending they knew The Way Things Should Be. Popes, CEOs, tech gurus, presidents, the lot of them all desperately clinging to their beliefs lest their followers abandon them.

That book made me realize that all the truths everyone "just knows" and takes for granted aren't necessarily truths. They're beliefs, or myths. Even so, there isn't anything necessarily wrong with that: a culture or civilization needs beliefs or myths to function, but what those beliefs are can determine the ultimate fate of that civilization and whether it's sustainable.

What I really took away from it is that I no longer really believe anything. Or perhaps more accurately, I recognize when something I hold true is actually a belief and not truth, and am willing to question it or understand that I continue to hold it despite any supporting evidence. I learned that beliefs are choices people make, for reasons their own.

I was always an atheist, but I realized religions are just more beliefs like any other belief people hold as true.

I learned that some beliefs can be beneficial ("If I'm good to others, others will be good to me") and others destructive ("Humans are the pinnacle of evolution"). Ideas don't need to be true to be helpful (which is why the relentless drive in tech communities, often, for the objective truth or a logical ordering and categorization for everything rubs me the wrong way).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)

This helped me understand the duality of the logical/mechanical and the creative/artistic. Then merging the two.

It will change your whole conception of what language is and how it can be used. It’s not about the characters or plots; they are recycled from antiquity. It’s about the absolute mastery of interrelation between words and imagery. It is something that has a meaning entirely emergent of its’ own self referential structure, rather than what is being described, in a sense that is almost mathematical. Realizing that was possible with writing really blew my mind.

It changed the way I see the world, how to have a sceptical mind and not only how but why one should question.

And also, it shows to me that, if you don't have a answer for something, doesn't mean that it can not be true. It's just that you don't know. And for a lot of things, this is the correct and only answer that we can have now.

"There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play."

The player in a finite game actually wants it to end, where the play itself is just a means to this end. He is "playing against play." The player in an infinite game wants it to continue, and revels in the game itself.

"Although it may be obvious, it is worth stressing that “play,” as it is used here does not mean merely “playing around.” Play, in this discussion, is a metaphor for any number of complex human engagements whenever they take on a competitive, or cooperative, character. Corporations, for example, not only compete with each other but are in themselves populations of strivers, each trying to supplant another, each struggling for higher incomes and titles. The same applies to schools and colleges where attaining superior grade averages, degrees, and honors absorb the lives of students. Sexuality and marriage are often finite battle grounds with winners and losers. In fact, the features of play–finite and infinite–are essentially the same whether we are children playing jacks or soldiers caught up in a war between nations."

To me it is a concise and broadly applicable way to see the world.

https://jamescarse.com/wp/?page_id=61

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989.Finite_and_Infini...

2.) Candide by Voltaire - contributed to my personal sense of humor and belief that we live in neither the best nor worst of all possible worlds, but simply the most absurd of them.

3) The Art of War by Sun Tzu - Helped me understand the power of small effeciencies in large systems and the importance of metagaming.

https://www.amazon.com/Illuminatus-Trilogy-Pyramid-Golden-Le...

To be fair, I'm not a big recreational reader. But this one will always stick out to me. When I read it in college, it had such a profound effect on me, I belive it literally helped shape who I am as a person even to this day

Maybe it was right place, right time. It is certainly an impressionable age, but I have read it again as an older man, & it was just as powerful.

I've read "Guns, germs & steel", "How to win friends & influence people", "Freakonomics" & some of the other stuff that pop up in the comments, they are all fine. But none of them influenced me like "Walden" did.

A true American classic.

It's like Design Patterns for human conversations: the result of studying how people interact, common patterns that work, and how things break down. Really crystallised a lot of insights I'd perceived but never thought about systematically. I highly recommend it.

Word of warning - there are a few books with this title. Look for the one by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen.

Also Thinking Fast and Slow, recommended elsewhere in this thread.

"The selfish gene" changed the way I define life, opened my eyes to virtual life, and morality of selfishness vs. altruism.

"Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life" changed the way I view the life and material existence. Whereas before I viewed them as two separate domains, after I see them as a spectrum.

Chinese classic taoism treaties: "Dao De Jing", and "Zhuan Zi", offers a via-negativa way of thinking and view of existence, the values are beyond words.

For a long time I had wanted to start a business but after reading that book I truly believed I could. It was a long journey but I now run my own software business and I honestly would not have started on this path had my friend not recommended it to me.

To be honest, I'm almost embarrassed to admit it. It is not high-brow literature, and I don't even think it's considered to be a good book on being an entrepreneur, but it was a very important part of my story.

https://www.amazon.ca/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Pol...

And a general +1 for GEB. If you read that as a teenager, you are different for it.

It made me aware that someone as successful and powerful as Napoleon himself was by a large extent only a product of the people and the mood at the time. What I mean is that it wasn't him who inspired the people; it rather was just the Zeitgeist he was the perfect person for. I'm not a native speaker and can't really put it into words, but it completely changed my view of the amount of influence we really can have in this world, and how much we are a product of our time.

Narziß und Goldmund by Hesse.

Again a lack of words from my side. Whoever is looking for meaning in life should read this book. The last sentence of this book is (at least in German) the literary most perfect and awakening phrase I've ever read. I couldn't sleep for days afterwards.

Barack Obama read it at 22 and said it was mesmerizing and that it shaped how he thinks about politics.

Speaking of "groking", Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love and The Fountain Head have probably had the most impact on my mindset.

Each book is rather different, but in general the idea of all three is

You have to be in life for yourself, and only you can define who you are / want to be.

That doesn't necessarily mean you need to be mean, but the idea that "greed is good", or that it's okay to be selfish, provided you think long term. It's about coming to terms and accepting you are greedy. But with that insight you can do introspection and learn about what drives you and make decisions yourself.

It's almost as if another layer of consciousness, learning about ones self.

The first is Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky. This was the first political book I had ever read and it completely rocked my world. I knew the US was involved in some nefarious stuff, but never to that extent. Completely changed the way I read news / history & how I react to current events.

The other book is Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

The First Immortal by James Halperin - introduced me as a sixth grader to things like cryonics, nanotech, etc. Got me thinking about a realistic ambitious nearer term future for humanity, rather than a more fantasy-like one in the other sci-fi I'd read at that point, like Asimov and Heinlein

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen - gave me much greater agency in life. Made me realize “You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”

The Power of Vulnerability by Brenè Brown and Quiet by Susan Cain.

The first is not a real book since it's audio only, there is no written counterpart but it changed the way I see, connect, live in the world entirely. I _never_ found something along those lines.

While the second book, Quiet, although a little boring in some sides, made me accept my introversion (although I don't appear like an introvert).

If I had to pick only one then it would be the power of vulnerability, such a shame it hasn't a paper counterpart (you could read all brene brown books probably and get the same message, but that audio book is so great).

Perhaps the most nuts-and-bolts useful of books for me has been John Saxon's Algebra 1 and Algebra 1 1/2 textbooks. After coasting through high-school algebra without gaining any real mastery, in my early 20s I sat down with these two masterworks of clarity and re-taught myself algebra in the space of a couple full weekends. I use this (re-)learning every day of my life.

All said and done I feel like it's made me look at and evaluate a lot more possibilities at all important junctions in my life (if not all junctions). It's helped me channelise my mind better to understand signals I care about in an otherwise extremely noisy world. It's also made me a stronger individual being able to do more for people and look at things sometimes as just a series of outcomes, and making everyday life and outcomes more tolerable for me emotionally as well.

Second, Wendell Berry’s many essays and short-stories. His skepticism about technology can be taken to Luddite extremes, but his questioning of the full human impact of technology has profoundly affected how I think: that technology not only enables new human possibilities, but more importantly, shapes the very meaning of what it means to be human.

Finally, Paul Graham’s essays, especially his one on wealth. It’s the clearest explanation of “Make what people want” that I have read, and has a liberating affect on a mind that has been conditioned by society to be just another employee. I wouldn’t have jumped head-first into the startup world were it not for PG’s influence.

Was a big help in helping me understand how empathy can help to resolve issues and how fundamentally different we all can think - be it medieval humans or alien beings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenocide

Maybe it didn't change my mind about "everything," but it did change my mind about everything related to negotiating.

The premise is that "no," is not an answer to be feared and avoided - it's an answer to be sought out. Getting a "no" is a key part of understanding the other side's position.

Many of the techniques he teaches can be used in non-negotiation settings.

For example, consider the seemingly simple problem of asking good questions. The author advocates interrogative-led questions over leading questions:

- interrogative led: begins with "who," "where," "what," "when," and "why."

- leading: binary answer, and usually begins with "do" or "does"

Consider the difference between the answers you're likely to get by asking "Did you like the movie?" vs. "What did you think of the movie?"

When you ask someone an interrogative-led question, you acknowledge their agency and challenge them to think. When you ask a leading question, more often than not, you're trying to manipulate the other person. Worse, you will get much less helpful answers.

Works great for job interviews, and many other professional settings.

One oddity: I've seen interviews/presentations with author, but he's a surprisingly bad speaker. As a how-to writer he's one of the best I've read.

The title sounds it's appealing to some kind of self-help shenanigans on how to fake your knowledge on books, but in truth is a very coherent metaliterary theory that delves into memory, psychoanalysis, honesty, and creativity.

Because of this, and since it correctly argues that the line separating what you have read from what you haven't isn't as clear or obvious as it appears, it's inspiring because it shows you a way through the seemingly endless human library; and liberating because it allows you to reconcile yourself with your limited knowledge of any particular set of books.

Since it's impossible to know even a fraction of all that has been published, and because your memory is fallible, whenever you are talking about books, whatever book it may be, in some sense you are always talking about a book you haven't read.

That being so, it's far better to own it as it is and to take advantage of that fact, talking confidently about any book. And this is where this book can really come handy.

Ever since I first read it some years ago, I felt I had a weight lifted from my shoulders. I'm not as bold as Pierre Bayard is, and I still find myself awkward for not having read so many important books. But now I'm more at ease, knowing that others, whoever they are, are also in a somewhat similar situation. Instead of feeling an ignorant sod, I now know I'm surrounded by an endless throng of likewise ignoramuses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Symbolic_Species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_...

Similar book is “Stoner” by John Williams

and the concept of the political: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo54...

I used to think of laws and society as just arbitrary things. However, I now see that they reflect thousands of years of wisdom / improvement and are critical to creating the conditions for people to flourish. The right to earn a living helped me understand the common law system and why we should care about unenumerated rights and how to create a more just society.

The concept of the political helped me see how nihilistic egalitarianism and feckless bureaucracy isn't a bug but a feature of liberal democracy and how it doesn't have to be that way.

Imagine the plot of three or four excellent movies woven together. It struck me how little human nature changes over time and across cultures. It also features some fascinating Russian history as a backdrop. As a person who almost exclusively reads non-fiction, it changed my view of how powerful fiction can be. I can't fathom what must've been in Tolstoy's mind to have the ability to create something like this.

Honorable mention to The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I'd like to learn more about Russian literature - I don't know if it's these authors and books that grabbed me, or if it's something larger.

1) "A Guide of the Good Life." This is an approachable intro to stoicism and helped me become more conscious of which things are within my control and which things are outside of my control. I now spend a lot more time focusing on the former and a lot less time being anxious about the latter.

2) Books like "Traction" (by Gabriel Weinberg) and "Cracking Creativity" that take a fuzzy subject like marketing or being creative and show that you can get very far by following recipes/algorithms/heuristics. Skill like creativity are not purely innate; they can be learned.

3) "Economics in One Lesson." (Spoiler: the one lesson is: "economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.") After this book, I now think much more carefully about proposed policies/rules/business strategies/etc. "Subsidized child care" or "charge businesses per seat" can sound great on the surface, but specific proposals often have so many unintended or negative consequences that are not discussed, and it's important to weigh those consequences against the benefits.

4) A statistics textbook. I don't remember the specific book that was my first stats textbook, but learning about statistics made me a lot more skeptical and inquisitive about data. Now when I see a graph or number reported in the news, I think "are there ways that this might be misleading?" instead of "omg cool this is a graph in a popular magazine so it must be true."

"Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

Resonates with me in real life a lot.

I'm only a quarter of the way through but it's already giving me vast amounts of insight into the roots of western civilization. It's also equipping me with mental models to analyze modernity and determine where we are in the history of civilization. It looks like we're in the decadent period.

My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knasgaard

An auto-biographical novel that's over 3600 pages for the entire series. It's really just the most accurate literary experience of modern man. I'm finding it quite useful to analyze my own conscious experience through life.

The Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons. It is deeply philosophical and caused me to think about life in a way no other science fiction has before or since. I found myself really sympathizing with the characters in these books, and found the overall plot incredibly fascinating.

Another good one is the Commonwealth Saga series (and others set in the same universe) by Peter F. Hamilton. It's a very _big_ space opera with lots of engaging characters, interesting technology, exciting descriptions of interstellar war, and a good reminder of just how unlike humanity an alien species could be. It really opened my mind to possibilities of humanity in the future in terms of how we might progress, both in terms of progressing out into the galaxy and how we could progress as a species.

Presents a compelling case for being optimistic that economic growth really will keep making the world continually better on average, and in particular explores the reasons why the contrary position is often so prevalent in the media, popular opinion etc.

Regardless of whether you agree with the thesis of the book per se it's a fascinating read which will definitely give you a lot of new perspective on debates on big topics - things that come up often on HN such as AI, climate change, international relations etc. I thoroughly recommend it.

I discovered the dire situation of men, with health and social conditions that top women’s problems by a factor 50, but we’ve never heard about. Funny thing is the guy is still a feminist in his approach (give men what used to be only given to women), but finally seeing men in a society where we really carr a lot when women face a problem... it changed my vision of life and humanity.

* Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

* Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

* Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (evidence based, ~1,000 references)

* The Promise of Sleep: A Pioneer in Sleep Medicine Explores the Vital Connection Between Health, Happiness, and a Good Night's Sleep (sleep debt)

* Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

* Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

* Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think

Girard was a professor at Stanford and writes about the idea of 'mimetic desire'. His overarching idea is humans are fundamentally creatures of mimesis, and whether we realize it or not all our desires are born out of mimic the desires of those around us. We don't think critically about what we actually want, we just sub-consciously mimic each other's desires - which ultimately leads to conflict.

[West World Spoiler coming]

Reading his book, and theory on mimetic desire, felt like when Bernard realizes he's a host in West World https://www.amazon.com/See-Satan-Fall-Like-Lightning/dp/1570...

I don't think I've ever stopped thinking about that story and how, even if there was someone in the other boat, I could react as if there wasn't, and things would be better.

Not a book, but once I'd read and re-read enough https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ articles to start to understand his view on narcissism and how it's an epidemic problem in the West.

Something like https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdow... from 2013 about the government shutdown, or https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/01/randi_zuckerberg.htm... from 2014 about why people are really so obsessed with Facebook and why we fill our home lives with work.

The author poses the idea of intentionally losing when arguing with a loved one since the victory will usually be a hollow one. It might seem like simple advice, but I found it extremely influential in my life.

There are many times when being right is actually the worst thing to be and made me consider if winning an argument was worth (potentially) damaging a long term relationship. When it was, this book gave some good advice about quickly repairing the damage and minimizing the consequences.

Sapiens, recently. It had a profound effect on how I think about people, history and progress... Particularly, the points about group size and all th cultural clockwork required for and limiting our ability to function as large groups.

Paul Graham's essays, which are kind of a web book.

Practical Ethics, by Peter Singer influenced me a lot (made me study philosophy) but I was a lot less expensive impressed by my decades-later re-read.

While I think it's a pinch silly oversimplification of things, it makes good arguments against central planning and for individuality and liberty.

It really struck a chord in an impressionable 16 year old.

Plotinus -Enneads

Markus Aurelius - Meditations

Descartes - On method

Descartes - Meditations

Spinoza - On the improvement of Understanding

Leibniz - Monadology

Leibniz - Grace

Voltaire - Candid

Diderot - D'Alembert's Dream

Kant - How to orient oneself in thinking

Kant - Critique of Pure Reason

Kant - Critique of Judgment

Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel - Logic

von Kleist - Marionette Theatre

Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death

Heidegger - Being and Time

Sartre - Being and Nothingness

Sartre - Flies

Sartre - Nausea

Deleuze - Difference and Repetition

Kafka - Metamorphosis

Kafka - The Castle

Lem - Magellan Nebula

Lem - His Master's Voice

Cioran - A Short History of Decay

Pessoa - Book Of Despair

Wolfe - New Sun tetralogy

I was in my first couple years of military service when I read that. I can't really say how it changed my outlook on life, other than the fact that I liked how realistic the writing was, in regards to how children can adapt to an extreme situation (and how quickly naivety and innocence can be lost).

Lead me to read other books by Orson. I like many of them.

   - "Computation and the Future of the Human Condition"
   - "On the Quest for Computable Knowledge"

These tiny books in combination with some other similar books and ideas transformed the way I think about the world, physically, biologically, technologically - all from the perspective of computation - in terms of computational reducibility, kolmogorov complexity, emergence and entropy (RE maxwells demon - the meaning of life? more like the universal property resulting in the emergence of life like patterns and fluctuations in energy and matter)... sorry all a bit vauge, but difficult to articulate succinctly, read the (very short) books and maybe you will latch on to the same train of thought, it was mentally transformative for me.

I read it once a year. It changed how i think about everything. My career is based on this book. My interaction with people and groups of people is based on this book.

A lot of warfare is not about violence even. Violence and attrition are bad, to be avoided. The goal is to win before the first shot is fired.

A lot of things that can be applied to life. For example,

Holding the high ground - don't lower yourself to someone's level just because they're taunting you. If you maintain the high ground while others try to drag you down, you'll have a large advantage.

Counterattack - sometimes the best offense is to stay on the defensive, to tip the enemy off balance and counter.

Sometimes you have to be intimidating as a form of defense. Sometimes you envelop/surround and destroy. Sometimes you want to draw attacks to decoys and straw men. Sometimes you hammer them down with suppression fire to advance. Sometimes you want to lose battles to win wars. Sometimes you have beaten and humiliated an enemy, but instead of destroying them, you recruit them to your side.

All skills useful in business, work politics, and anything that involves conflict.

From a technology standpoint, "The Pragmatic Programmer" changed the way I looked at programming. When I read it the first time, I was a Visual Basic programmer, with only a passing familiarity with the world outside the Microsoft ecosystem. After reading that I began to explore Perl, then Python, and installed Linux and learned it. For my career as a developer, then team lead, and then manager, that book changed me more than any other book I've read in the field.

  - Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society"
  - N.N.Taleb "The Black Swan"
  - Danny Kahneman "Thinking Fast & Slow" (also his papers with Amos Tversky)
  - Thomas Ligotti "The Conspiracy against the Human Race"
  - Peter Wessel Zapffe "On the Tragic" & "The Last Messiah"
  - Sokal, Alan D "Intellectual Impostures"
  - Simon Herbert "A The Sciences of the Artificial"
  - Herbert Marcuse "One-Dimensional Man"
  - Schopenhauer "Parerga and Paralipomena"
  - Lewis Mumford "The Story of Utopias"
  - Michel Foucault "Discipline and Punish"
  - Edward S. Herman "Manufacturing Consent - The Political Economy of the Mass Media"
  - Franklin Foer "World Without Mind The Existential Threat of Big Tech"
  - Ben Goldacre "Bad science"
  - Emil Cioran "The Book of Delusions"
  - Gracian "The Art of Worldly Wisdom"
  - Heidegger Martin "The Question Concerning Technology"
  - Jacques Ellul "Propaganda The Formation of Mens Attitudes"
  - Mumford Lewis "The Culture of Cities"
  - Orwell "1984", "Down and Out in Paris and London", "Animal Farm"
  - Huxley "Brave New World", "The Doors Of Perception"
  - Michael Pollan "How to change your mind"
  - Jeff Hawkins "On Intelligence"
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", "Notes from the Underground", "The Brothers Kasamarov", "The Gambler", "The Idiot", "Crime & Punishment"
  - Peter Smith "Teach Yourself Logic"
  - Thomas More "Utopia"
  - Emil Cioran "The Trouble With Being Born"
  - Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago"
  - Nietzsche "Complete works"
  - Bulgakov "Master and Margarita"
  - Gerald M. Weinberg "The Secrets of Consulting"

This kind of clear, higher-level thinking about technology is rare and valuable. In the IT world, there's presumably a way to use the model, substituting "data" for "energy", but I've never seen (or come up with) one.

Jordan B. Peterson "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" made me more proactive and helped to summarize some past experience.

Richard Feynman "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" awesome book, about awesome life of awesome person.

Society and structure: Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

Business: Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

Life: The Gospel of Matthew

It has shaped my thinking on 'what is good' or 'what does quality' mean. As an engineer it is easy to appreciate the author slowly going insane about the details he keeps coming back to, and as a human it is invaluable to have an understanding yourself of when something is 'good'.

Highly recommended.

The book is a series of histories of disaster events, natural and human-made. It shows how traditional ideas of what happens to people in crisis - i.e. that it brings out the worst in human nature and people need to be managed, by force if necessary - are wrong and that disaster and hardship create temporary communities that are peaceful, egalitarian, and supportive. In many cases, the experience of working in common to support others was so powerful that it led to profound individual and even structural political transformations.

All in all, it's a deeply optimistic view of human nature, one that you rarely see these days.

Studying and playing poker in high school changed how I thought about problems of incomplete information and how to gather the most information possible to make a decision. This book, in particular, for introducing The Fundamental Theorem of Poker and its use and application, gave me tools of reasoning and analysis of complex problems that I have built on and still use to this day.

Reading about how he experienced time in a concentration camp with endless hope to be reunited with his wife kept him going and surviving each day hungry, cold, and doing his best to take care of the ill. He learned the positive impact of hope and when individuals lost it, they quickly fell ill or died. It gave me perspective and to challenge my way of thinking in addition to helping clients learn there are multiple ways to interpret anything.

Totally changed how I view budgeting/team management, etc. Helped me learn about my own productivity and how to improve it. Introding flow and such to me. A lot of other books say similar things but they are generic, so its easy to write off with "oh, well software os different". But peopleware is specifically about software development.

Actually transformative concepts are usually not simple, and they need to mature in the thinkers mind.

Most important subjects are ao large it would be impossible to cram them into a single book.

Books can be insightfull and amazing, and there are several that are so vivid I find chapters from them popping into my head. A few recent books I feel have been very enligthening to me:

Notes on the synthesis of form by Alexander. Skunk works by Ben Richie. Influence by Cialdini. Skin in the game by Taleb. Isaacson's biographies.

Another I'd add is 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins. I have a Bachelor degree in science and never thought I'd be able to add to my understanding of evolution, but this book accomplished it. Almost everything I've studied can be broken into two periods - that I studied before reading the Selfish Gene, and what I studied after.

Lastly, I'd add Hume's 'Treatise on Human Nature', specifically his theory of substances. The basic idea was that as you learn more information about a substance, how you define that substance changes. First you see an orange ball, and you think it's just an orange colored ball. Later someone tells you it's a fruit, and your understanding of it changes.

How this is relevant is that I realized this can be applied to the world at large. Our understanding of any given phenomena is intrinsically linked to what we know about it. So there is no such thing as 'enlightenment' 'self-awareness' etc, there is only ever increasing awareness as we move through life, and we can also make a point to be intentional about increasing our own awareness.

It really illustrates the enormity of the energy problem and the changes that are needed to make sustainability a reality, especially for densely populated regions like Europe and Japan.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Erving Goffman uses the metaphor of theater to explain how we perform roles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Ev...

I would say How to Do Things With Words by JL Austin which talks about the power of words to bring things into existence but it really gets into too much detail for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Austin#How_to_Do_Things_...

Similarly Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau-Ponty really influenced me but it is really really really long and dense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_of_Perception

I think any atheist rational person should read this, to get a more realistic view on himself/herself and the world around you.

Our society is too individual and self-centered, which is actually a wrong view on how the world works. I recommend this to anyone, especially when you lose someone or something big in your life.

Poland by James Michener - or any other of Michener's historical fiction. Not all of them are great literary works, but because they span thousands of years, they caused me to start thinking generationally.

It's mindblowing just as a work of history (prehistory really) but it also entirely changed how I viewed environmentalism. It made me realize that untouched wildernesses don't exist. Every single landscape on earth has been irrevocably and entirely reshaped by humanity. The Earth is a garden and we are its gardeners, now we just need to get good at it.

It opened my mind to be able to understand all kinds of storys on another level.

In school I always hated literature. It was like they tried to make me do something I just didn't understand at all. Literature was just random stories for me and all interpretation and attribution of meaning was fruitless and had I to just guess/fake it. Yea maybe my education was just bad who knows, doesn't matter now.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces changed that. Now I was open for all the literature and saw everything in a new light. I could recognize common concepts in stories and human life in general.

It also opened my mind for later Alan Watts reads on the interconnected-ness of everything. Someone already recommended Alan Watts. Which I can only approve of! I'd also like to add "The Way of Zen" and "The Book - On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are", also by Watts.

(self-copy from previous similar discussions)

This book consists of over 100 very short stories that are inspired by Buddhist teachings. It's contributed quite a bit to making me wiser, happier, less anxious and having better interpersonal skills.

Anyhow, few books have made as significant an impact on my life in both personal and professional circumstances than "Difficult Conversations" by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen.

A learned habit to stop and empathize with the motivations behind people's emotional upset has completely changed the way I interact with everyone in my life. I used to think that I was rational and a great communicator. I've come to understand that I've missed countless opportunities to comfort those I care about while saving myself literally years of stress.

Many of my regrets are based on retroactive realizations of how avoidable some of my communications failures actually were, given the long term damage that they helped to cause.

Please, read Difficult Conversations and give copies to people that you love.

Sometimes when I feel a bit sad I remind myself to read a few chapters. It reminds me what I find important in life. What I can ask from myself and from other. It gives me joy in a good way.

It was the first/only book that put into words feelings I've had for my entire teenage-->adult life around the complexities of a dysfunctional middle class family.

This explains so much of human behavior, but I hesitate to recommend it to people because it is so easily weaponized. To borrow from Harry Potter, it's the closest thing I've seen to a book of charm spells, but was written as a defense against the dark arts. Better everyone read it rather than just the marketers.

What I really love about this book is how much of politics it has explained for me, including the downfall of the USSR and the American civil rights movements, but also newer events like Schwarzenegger's poltiical career.

If you like this, I'd also recommend:

"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg

All are in a similar vein. For more focused book on human behavior, I recommend first time team leads/managers read:

"Switch" by Dan and Chip Heath

A solid guide to changing organizational behavior.

2. Thinking Fast and Slow - made me think about all of the biases that my mind has that I dont even realize

3. The organized mind - This book gave me a lot of ideas about how I can change my life to live with less distractions and maybe do thinks more efficently

4. The Vital Question - Made me realize how lucky we as humans and complex cellular beings are to even exist.

5. Misquoting Jesus (and all of Ehrman's other books) - Gave me talking points I use against any/all overzealous Christians in my life. The stories of the bible are not remotely close to the stories that where handed down by the people that were with Jesus when he died. Over 100s of years and many errors (and a lot of luck), people decided Jesus was the son of God. Unfortunately for them, the chances of that being true are very very close to zero.

For a real mindbender, read Kuhn (history of science), Carlota Perez (economics), and Stephen Jay Gould (evolutionary biology) in rapid succession. There're very similar ideas there around paradigm shifts, selection bias, and responses to environmental change there, appearing in many disparate domains.

"Tools of Titans" - Tim Ferriss : This book can be seen a summary of 15 most popular non-fiction books. There are a lot of guests in this book with a diverse back ground. There is wide wisdom you can pick on every page of this book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31823677-tools-of-titans

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2053923.What_Every_Paren... - a very nice book about neuroscience for parents

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26329.Emotional_Intellig... - changed the way how I think about emotions and interactions with people

The basic idea of the book that you cannot think straight until you understand the hard limits of thought, and respect it can never be more than a supplement to performing useful actions in the world, is a lesson I've never unlearned.

Then Nietzsche did the same years later - he truly can't be appreciated until you've spent 5-10 years reading philosophy searching for 'truth' and being frustrated.

Finally, engineering school really twisted things again and made me confront the difficulty of maintaining fundamental skepticism in the face of reliable scientific law (or even the occasional deterministic program).

Its been quite the trip

I started reading this book after my startup failed. I was looking for a job and I have this mindset that I need to find this perfect job to fit my passion. So the job hunting took sometime.

Picking up this book helps me understand there is not much need for passion but more on the development of my talent and skills. It’s listed as a self-help book so some might dislike it.

However the book did shed a different light on me. I’m in my new role for about two years now and within this period I gotten a double promotion.

Do I love the work I do? Not really, it’s product ops mainly so people find you to fix “issues”. However it does improved my skills a lot especially in the area of managing cross functional teams .

I think this book is great for people going through career transition. And it changed the way I view passion.

I recently read that one and it made me see my profession as a software engineer in a new light.

At work, I catch myself using possessive pronouns about code a lot for example. It really shone a nice light on the human element and how we reason and think about code and programming.

Really recommend reading that one!

The intersection of billions of years of history, a scale where ice ages come and go like thunder storms, where mountains go up and down in quick succession, with the human timescale of scientific progress, really altered my perspective on a lot of things. We didn't have plate tectonics until the 1970's. My grandfather went to high school and college learning the classical theories of orogenies, and just two generations later, a blink of an eye relative to the movements of our Earth, human understanding of what shapes our world is massively advanced.

It's made me think about every human endeavor differently. Everything we do and are is so ephemeral.

Much of our upbringing and education is underpinned by the assumption that "talent" is a real thing. Peak dismantles that assumption pretty thoroughly. The implications are far-reaching and I recommend it to everyone.

When he says anything, he means anything. How to measure the value of a human life, how to estimate things you know nothing about (like the gestation period of an African elephant), and how to get better at measuring things with limited information.

This book radically changed my understanding of reality, consciousness and the nature of self. I’m a very skeptical and scientifically minded person; this book looks at the subject of life after death from an evidence based approach.

I distinctly remember reading and re-reading the chapter telling the tale of the Grand Inquisitor. Only after two or three readings of the whole novel I began to grasp Dostoevsky's answer to the Inquisitor's objections, which are not stated plainly in the text but are instead suggested by the way the narrative unfolds.

I have read many other books by Dostoevsky (my other favorites are "The Devils" and "The Idiot"), but "The Brothers Karamazov" is still my favorite.

Simple things as "Watch your language! Never say “I can’t do that”" or "Never blame anything or anybody else for your misfortune" And my favorite is "Grab every opportunity which is going" You'll keep yourself busy and open for the world.

https://hundredfoot.com/bookstore/the-midas-method

It's a little dated but the stupid thing is the basic principles if you can be bothered to understand them really do work.

" Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life's work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker's brilliant and impassioned answer to the "why" of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie -- man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing. "

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine

There was one specific anecdote that rung true. Jackie Robinson, the first African American baseball player. It took a lot of guts to actually make in the MLB. First to get in athletically. Second to not lose his cool, because of racial segregation. Third, to actually be recognized as Rookie of the year. He had a lot of opposition against him but never got triggered. And he was a role model for many.

There's some other good books, like the "Toyota Way" and "Thinking fast and slow"

1. Getting to Yes 2. Getting Past No

Those two books by themselves are enough to truly learn how to become an adept principled negotiator.

Link: https://krishnamurti-teachings.info/book/commentaries-on-liv...

Archived page: http://archive.is/mp9W6

Streams of Living Water by Richard Foster

Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis

every action humans take can be traced back to an incentive

It's not enough to know that an action traces back to an incentive. You also need to know which of multiple possible incentives might be the incentive. The obvious incentive is often not the actual incentive, as we're seeing demonstrated in current American and British politics.

Also appealing to children

2. Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time.[2]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33426.Hyperspace

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95887.Eat_That_Frog_

This is the book that really got me into programing. I'd tried programming before, and had even studied a C++ textbook and written some simple programs. But it really hadn't clicked. Graham's points about the fundamental expressiveness of different programming languages really blew my mind. This started a chain of "learn language X and try to build Y" for different values of X and Y.

Part of what I realized is how much I had been hampered by how difficult C++ is to pick up (especially with the IDEs of the early 2000s, which would give you an "empty" project with a couple hundred lines of code in it). When I realized that to write a Perl script, all I needed to do was open Notepad and start from an empty file, it was just so unbelievably liberating. That and also, obviously, just how much easier dynamic languages are to work with in general. Of course I eventually came back to C++, but that was the spark which kicked off a journey that lead to me flying through CS in college and eventually ending up in a PhD program.

Edit: Fixed link. Note also that the essays are available online for free, though you have to reverse engineer the reading order from the table of contents.

Not only did it help me see that no matter how accomplished/famous/old someone is, there is the demystifying shared thing that we all do, but also humbled me when I get too full of my skills or experience with anything in life. It’s a pretty silly thing but always pops in my mind and changes my behavior almost instantly.

Obviously it didn’t change the way I think about everything but changed the way I think about everything with people and social situations.

I think about "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell a lot directly. Over time I've appreciated it as a way to both motivate me to work towards success, and also to cope with feeling not successful enough. The fact reflecting on that book is helpful for both sides of that coin is part of its staying power for me, I think.

"The State" by Franz Oppenheimer was also impactful. It was the first kind of political theory that really gripped me. The idea that the State was something to analyze and scrutinize in the way that he did was exhilarating. Touched a nerve that resulted in significantly more questioning of authority and critical thinking about power, generally.

"why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby" made a difference, too. The book itself is great and it helped me to learn Ruby, and it also introduced me to _why. His work made me view programming as not just a craft, like building a chair, but also as an art form, like writing a book. It can be a way to express yourself and be creative, and programmers can, indeed, be creative, too!

I read these books when I first got into management and they changed so many things about the way I communicate with others. Everything in the books is obvious but things I was never taught growing up.

Learning how to understand others' intentions by the totality of their body language along with what they say is incredibly important. It's helpful for diffusing tense situations, understanding whether or not strangers pose a threat, easing tension in a relationship, etc.

Made me see the world, my life, my code and my desires, everything in a total different way.

It's like when you want to an apple then someone points out that a hole the worm's head can be seen out of it, or that actually the painting you're about to throw is masterpiece worth millions.

Gives light were it's all darkness.

It's really life changing, at least, it was for me.

It helped me understand how I created all the trouble I have experienced in my life, why I never became “succesful” and why I had felt so stuck most of my life.

I now understand how my mindset, how I see the person in front of me, either as a person or as an object, has a greater impact on my results than anything else.

Even on my abillity to be unstuck, to change my mind, to moce fast and break things.

10/10 would recommend it to anyone.

The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples by John Gottman revolutionized my understanding of trust and relationships. Reading it was like flipping on the light switch after stumbling around in the dark for decades.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson revolutionized my understanding of myth, faith, suffering, evil, meaning, and responsibility. It illuminates the underlying ailments that plague our modern societies and describes what we can and should do, as individuals, to improve our lives and the lives of those around us. It reaffirms the basic tenant of many world religions that suffering is real, and that the intentional creation of unnecessary suffering is evil. And finally, it makes a case that meaning is derived from responsibility.

Both are nice reads but Harari's book is shallow from multiple respects, and Diamond's book omits important counter-examples.

To me the book that made everything fall into place with respect to political history (and at some point, political philosophy) - and that I actually read before Harari and Diamond - was Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order". An absolute must-read.

My most recent example is Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, it made me realize how difficult it would be for us to communicate with, or even comprehend the motives of a sentient alien. I wrote a full review here: http://www.alphadevx.com/a/519-Review-of-Solaris-by-Stanisla...

The most memorable part was around the fox.

All good ideas help, and we test those theories and decide our ourselves to keep the idea or ignore it. We are sum total of our ideas and behaviors, and it constantly evolves. Good books help with forming good ideas, and clear thinking. It varies from person to person. It could be Quran, a psychology book, or a puzzle book.

- Thanks for the feedback [1]. How to give and receive feedback well.

- Start [2]. Sort of your run of the mill self help book. Thought it had some nice insights in it.

- Glass House [3]. Talks about the deterioration of industrial towns and the society that used to be built around them.

- Thinking in Bets [4]. Approaching situations from the perspective of a gambler and how to choose what to do when you don't know all the facts.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114120-thanks-for-the-...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17249189-start

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29939240-glass-house

[4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35957157-thinking-in-bet...

It inspired me to think about the role technology can play in improving someone's life, enhancing their development, helping them thrive.

Books: 1. Sapiens - It finally connected a lot of dots on how things work in the world (money, governments, religions, companies etc) and how humans communicate at scale.

2. On intelligence - Gives you a decent perspective on how brains work. How they are like learning centers that are continuously trying to figure out what is going on around us. How they store and recall that data and finally how they use our senses to put a lot of context around different concepts like objects, ideas, poems, people etc. Also it shares some examples to prove that our brain is not limited by its senses. Those examples just blew my mind wide open.

3. Biography of Einstein - I always imagined that people like Einstein are lone geniuses and worked in a silo. But it was pretty clear from the bio that even Einstein learnt and practiced his science by bouncing off ideas and fine tuned his explanations through many many different and equally brilliant people. And the role that his parents played in constantly keeping him challenged.

Non book: Blue planet 2: You think aliens would be different than us? Check out some of the species on our own planet and no animal will ever seem alien to you anymore.

Some ideas that got triggered outside of a particular book: 1. All non natural things around us that I thought were super complicated were actually built by humans like me. Rules, bridges, planes, rockets, buildings, religions etc. This opened my mind that even I am capable to contributing in a significant manner.

2. Happiness is not the goal. It is an incentive to get the goal. This keeps me motivated to think beyond the current issues and focus on the future.

Two books by Erich Fromm, a German/American philosopher of the 50s/60s: The Art of Loving. Some points: To him love is a skill that has to be practiced and learned, love in a relationship is constant hard work, love of another is only possible if you first love yourself, and you cannot love another human being if you do not love mankind. A little bit later he published The Sane Society, a Marxist critique of capitalist society, how consumerism leads to self-alienation etc.

Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism have in common that they offered the atomized individual a new refuge and security. These systems are the culmination of alienation. The individual is made to feel powerless and insignificant, but taught to project all of his human powers into the figure of the leader, the state, the "fatherland," to whom he has to submit and whom he has to worship. He escapes from freedom and into a new idolatry. All the achievements of individuality and reason, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century are sacrificed on the altars of the new idols. ...built on the most flagrant lies, both with regard to their programs and to their leaders.

Sounds familiar?

- Donna Meadows' Thinking in Systems, how to model anything as an interconnected system, and how unseen positive and negative feedback loops cause unintended consequences in any system

- Anne Lammott's Bird by Bird - I have to write a lot for my work and this is the best primer on getting things out the door

- For the Australians: Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu, on how early white European settlers completely misunderstood indigenous agriculture, all the things that were lost when Europeans settled Australia, and what we can use today. Gives you a VERY different look at Australian history.

- Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide. Just came out, an absolutely amazing intro and look at modern economics, the flimsiness of neoliberalist thought, and how we need to use the tools of each economic school of thought to think about the economy, not getting stuck on one school

Applying the lessons made my studying many times more productive. After getting Bs and Cs in many of my undergrad classes, I recently finished a five course post-bacc CS program with all As. While Dr. Oakley isn't the only reason, it absolutely helped!

I know this is a recent book but it got me to think about personal, religious, and government motivations from a different perspective.

Also, now that we know more about epigenetics, that's another really interesting framework in which to contemplate Jaynes's thesis.

Bastiat was a great French Economist and liberal political philosopher. He been considered as more of a popularizer than an original thinker, but that's unwarranted. The Law is the greatest work of classical liberal political though that I have encountered. In school we all read Locke's Second Treatise of Government, but we should have first read The Law. It's very short--more of a long essay than a full length book--but it packs an earth shattering wallop.

Bastiat is also an intellectual ancestor of the Austrian School of economics. The famous Hazlitt book, Economics in One Lesson, is an extended meditation on Bastiat's classic essay, That Which is Seen and That Which is Unseen [2], which is the origin of the Broken Window Fallacy.

[1] http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html

[2] http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

By giving vivid examples of failing or badly functioning and "maladaptive" (processes in) various (indigenous) societies he made made me value our current state of existence very much: Government, rights, laws, police, infrastructure, jobs, and all that really are a great achievement of mankind.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries got me thinking about applying the scientific method to things I never thought of before.

Currently in the middle of thinking fast and slow, and I think it may be happening again :p

Become genuinely interested in people, make them feel good, they will appreciated it. The advice is essentially don't be a jerk and do talk to people about the things they are interested. When you start doing that it's like playing life on easy mode.

In his latest collection of essays originally published in Natural History magazine, paleontologist Gould examines diverse and diverting topics. The title piece refers to toes, and we learn that five is not necessarily the optimum number. Gould re-examines the work of astronomer Edmund Halley and 16th-century Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who pinpointed the moment of creation (Oct. 23, 4004 B.C.);

Edit: I see The Selfish Gene listed here quite a bit. It might be of special interest to you to read Dawkins "rival" on the other side of the pond - Stephan Jay Gould. His "punctuated equilibrium" resonates with me more than Dawkins take on evolution, simply because it involves something less "neat".

Plus, even as a child I found Gould made me laugh out loud sometimes.

Another idea that book drove home was the power for the media and the utter control of your life a government can exert when it completely controls it.

I'm wrecked after this book. Hated that I couldn't find a good way to disagree with it. Feels like so many nice things I thought about the world were ruined, and will never come back.

The implications permeate so much of our daily life.

I... wouldn't really recommend reading it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steps_to_an_Ecology_of_Mind

I never actually read it until around the time the iPhone came out and everyone was walking around with those white earbuds. I remember sitting on the bus reading and I looked up and stared around at the people on their phones with their white earbuds and all I could think was holy fuck Ray Bradbury was right.

Realizing who you are not changes everything.

https://www.amazon.ca/Riding-Waves-Culture-Understanding-Div...

Literally rethought everything following this read.

Mixed in with the magical fantasy and high adventure, there are major philosophical themes of what it means to be free–and for Lucifer it is to absolve oneself from all concept of or involvement with worshipping a deity. It was a big influence on my thinking about religion and philosophy.

https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/mihaly-csikszentmihaly...

I'd done a lot of computer systems and engineering control courses but this book put systems into perspective for me. They're everywhere and we're embedded in them. If you want to change the world this is the book to read. Its also a quick read.

Reading "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer and "Private Truths, Public Lies" by Timur Kuran prepared the ground for it!

Also: A Pattern Language, The Design of Everyday Things, and An Introduction to General System Thinking, the latter by Gerald Weinberg

The idea that a company would have some kind of special research division where people can pretty much do as they wish (just "improve the product") feels like something in a fantasy world. But it existed, and it gave us amazing inventions that fast forwarded technology and improved the lives of everyone, and barely anyone even knows about it! Lasers, the transistor, fiber optics, UNIX, the cell network, even friggin information theory.

Even the [eventual] HQ building was designed in a interesting way. They had purposely long hallways of offices, so whenever you had to go to lunch (or the bathroom) you would inevitably be 'caught' by coworkers, forcing interaction.

Details the battle of Verdun (France v Germany), one of the longest and bloodiest battles of WW1 with around 700000 dead, more than 1 man killed every minute for 10 months. A slaughter of men by machinery. I've read a bunch of books about the great wars and they are all affecting, some of them deeply, but this one showed me in stark relief the mindless brutality and utter futility of war. People talk of wars as necessary, of actions as heroic. It's sad that a civilized species, capable of high reasoning, can still resort to base violence so easily. It wasn't very long ago, and there's been a lot of violence since, some of it on comparable scales. We don't learn much.

Just using pure reason and inference he not only made accurate predictions about DNA he also inspired a whole generation of physicists to switch to molecular biology and discover the fundamental building blocks of Life.

That really made me aware of all the things people do to try to influence other people. I probably read that book 15 years ago, but I still recognize sales tactics based on principles in that book. It helped me to be more aware of attempts at manipulation when people are trying to sell things. It had a big effect on what I noticed going on in the world.

It's really more about human psychology and how people attempt to influence each other than it is a book about selling.

As I side note I now have 10 books in my amazon shopping cart. This thread proved to be pretty dangerous.

Jiddu Krishnamurti - a freethinker, who said we need a revolution in the psyche of the individual

Paul Theroux - prolific travel writing

Oliver Sacks - his insights into brain disorders

Salman Rushdie - his early works, when he was in his prime, a giant in literature.

I'm not sure it's the best now but it was my introduction to it at the time.

1: http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Same.

Complexity, by Mitchell, is an introductory look at complex systems that changed the way I see the systems in the world and sent me off on a long tangent to learn more.

Life's Ratchet, by Hoffann, is just plain mind-blowing, or at least it was for me. It's about the inner mechanics of living cells, and does a really good job of conveying how insanely complex life is.

More recently, the short novel The Machine Stops blew me away with its prescience.

  * The Alchemist - the closest thing in my life to a religious text.  Just a beautiful story that I can recall at any time for some calm.

  * Desert Solitaire - just read this recently and it gave me an entirely new outlook on the relationship between humans and nature. 

  * Don Quixote - I was blown away by how a book that is ~600 years old could make me laugh and keep me interested.  Changed how I think about people 'a long time ago' since they could enjoy the same books I do.

  * House of Leaves - this one just split open my brain in an irreversible way, sort of like how you hear people describe certain drugs.

https://www.aeinstein.org/from-dictatorship-to-democracy/

It explains with many examples how stable, global structures arise from simple, local interactions.

It changed the way I think about economics, politics, society, evolution, computer science, and a whole host of other things.

Skinner's views on human behavior evolved a bit after this book was publish until he died but this book was my first contact with his ideas.

This book changed the way I view humans (myself included). It made me more empathic. It allowed me to unified many concepts of human/animal behavior and AI.

It was kind of like when I learned how to program - what I read in his book - gave me a new lens to interpret how or what I saw in the world. It created a crack that made me wonder what else I wasn't seeing or able to see.

There was a page in there about secrets in plain sight and it bothered me for years because I couldn't understand what he meant until I finally read Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and the sequel, What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Mindstorms by Seymour Papert

The New Jim Crow - this gave me a way to frame structural racism and its impact now, in today's society.

The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football - I read this in high school. And it really gave me an understanding on how sports reflects our society's structure and values in the narrow sense. And got me thinking about how, more broadly, pop culture is a really good lens to use to understand our culture whether it is sports, tv, music or mass media.

Highly recommend if like you are like I was - wondering when and how the next client was going walk in the door

https://www.amazon.com/1-Page-Marketing-Plan-Customers-Money...

"Old Southern Apples" by Lee Calhoun, as above but more about the potential wisdom and benefit in pursuing the quixotic.

"Beethoven's Letters" by LVB trans. Kalischer [Dover] - made me realize it's OK to struggle mightily with everyday difficulties even if you're shooting for the loftiest goals.

“No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.”

- The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy (there is absolutely nothing quite like it, and it taught me to laugh - or at least giggle - at anything)

- Dune (the notion of mental discipline, at least as idealized by Frank Herbert, made an impression on me)

- Sherlock Holmes (focused awareness and logic)

- Godel, Escher, Bach - The Eternal Golden Braid (multiple takes on awareness, logic and creativity)

There are more, but I tend to avoid Malcom Gladwell style books (and Freakonomics uses a lot of the extrapolation-by-slingshot-logic approach) and the like because they play upon our biases and are often quickly disproved.

The other book that feels most influential to me is "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. I read it many years ago when I was in college and studying CS. Maybe I just read it at the right time in my life, but I remember loving everything about it and being fascinated by all the different topics from math/science/CS/AI/history that it touched on while exploring its central thesis. In really broad strokes, the book is an exploration of logical paradoxes and the insights we can draw from them. It ultimately leads to a focus on the concept of recursion (in nature, in the human mind, in mathematics, in CS and AI, etc.), and how certain patterns of recursion found in math, nature, and the mind could form the basis of creativity, inspiration, natural diversity, human intelligence, etc.

But that's selling it short. It's a huge book that ranges over so many topics that it can seem overwhelming. I devoured it at the time, and it fired my imagination for many years later.

It's been 20-30 years since I read either book, so I can't say if they would hold up for me now. Maybe. But they introduced me to so many different ideas that led to so many more ideas and lines of reasoning throughout the rest of my life. For better or worse, I would be a different person if it weren't for those books.

It really opened my eyes to many issues about race I was not aware of and did a great job explaining the real problem is systemic racism. It had a pretty profound impact.

Note that I cannot always wholeheartedly, universally recommend all his later philosophical / atheism books to a wider audience, Selfish Gene is a no-brainer to me. --- Close second is Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.

- The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan - It gave me the tools required to cut through bullshit and helped me free myself from the shackles of a religious upbringing

- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - Gave me the courage to look at things differently when everyone thinks we know it all

- Zero to One by Peter Thiel - It made me question what I was doing professionally and I now have a list of questions to answer whenever I am in a startup to help guide me

- Compersion by Hypatia From Space - It help remove limits to how I can love and care for the people that are important to me.

Everything from leadership to how your mission needs to speak to people's reptilian brain first, because that's how people ultimately make their decisions.

It helped me think about the deep motivations that should drive me to build a successful company. Apart from making money. And all the benefits that comes with thinking from Why, to How and then to What.

It was an eye-opener for me. And it's full of real-world stories to really make you understand his points.

I highly recommend the audiobook narrated by Simon Sinek himself, on Audible.

In a nutshell: The mental models we typically use to think about and understand the behavior of organizations such as corporations and governments are deeply wrong.

It is the story of Beowulf, told from the monster's point of view. It underscores the constant internal struggle between nihilistic despair and finding meaning in life (for yourself and others). It strikes a chord with Ozymandias[0].

It is primarily responsible for me abandoning my strong Catholic upbringing (and, ironically, despite John Gardner himself being a Christian).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

It's an explanation that makes sense out of otherwise nonsensical human habits of cultures (tribal, ancient and modern).

If you're curious and want to read something enjoyable—he's a decent writer—check out "Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches" (preferably one of the later editions), or for something a little denser: "Cannibals and Kings".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Represen...

A Pattern Language

The Alphabet Vs The Goddess

Aloud: Voices From the Nuyorican Poets Cafe

The Fire Next Time

The book introduces the context of the scientific revolution and the thinking from which the ideas that we think of as science developed. It tells a very different story than the "dark ages to enlightenment" narrative and shows the seriousness and depth of thought at the time and also of subjects that many dismiss even without thinking, such as astrology.

Ancient human's may have more in common with schizophrenics of today than history would indicate. Religion may be a result thereof.

A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn

US History can be considered a function of large scale popular movements rather than decisions made by individuals (leaders).

Gun's Germs & Steel - Jared Diamond

Civilizations' success can be considered a function of base resources (edible grains, farmland, metals).

Evolution is the reason we exist! Understanding how it happens and why it can lead to counterintuitive outcomes is very important. He also narrates his own audiobooks and is excellent at it.

The Blank Slate & The Better Angels of our Nature by Pinker

Both books counter much accepted wisdom. The second book, in particular, will make you think of humanity in a fundamentally different light.

The Black Swan & Fooled by Randomness by Taleb

The role of chance in everyday life! It plays a big role!

Behave by Robert Sapolsky, The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson, Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman - we are animals shaped by evolution. The human brain isn't perfect and makes lots of silly mistakes. I learned not to belive everything I think.

The illuminating thing for me was the history of different groups, where they were from, where they settled, where they migrated and basically how these cultures remain in those areas for the most part.

Maybe I had a naive view before, but after moving from one region to another, it was enlightening to see things described this way and help understand aspects of southern culture.

We've all asked the questions: "What's life all about? Who am I?" This book won't give you the answers but it will show you why all the "solutions" given since the beginning of time are probably wrong. The author blends Eastern Zen with Western Psychology in a mix that will have your mind spinning right from the first page. Fair warning: You may lose your-self after reading this book.

Atlas Shrugged: I like this book because it attempts to show how things some people think are virtuous can be bad, and visa versa. The protagonists have a sort of honor code to them that defies common ideas of morality.

Don't Shoot the Dog: Describes how to do positive reinforcement training on dogs, horses, and even your children. People don't seem to realize how similar we are to other animals. Also, it's nice to know that positive methods can be more effective than punishments and dominance tactics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Pooh

Your Deceptive Mind - A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/your-deceptive-mind-...

This course helped me find places where i was allowing my own mind to run the show by default without thinking critically about my own motivations, thoughts, memories.

Grant Cardone's Be Obsessed or Be Average last week.

Finally, but mostly, Maurice Nicoll's Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of P.D. Ouspensky and G.I. Gurdjieff, though I recommend reading what is widely considered the "introductory" text, "In Search of the Miraculous" by P.D. Ouspensky.

Although it sounds like a self help book, it’s actually a fascinating interpretation and explanation of the Tao de Ching which was written 2500 years ago by Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.

It really helped me understand the wisdom of that text, which without the accompanying interpretation by Dyer is a bit like reading Shakespeare without the notes.

I think about this book almost every day, and it truly did change my life. highly recommended.

"The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch. Lots of life wisdom in there. https://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/ I recommended to watch the video _after_ you read the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Finite-Infinite-Games-James-Carse/dp/...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquir...

It's an outstanding book though I also liked his 'Beneath the Wheel' and 'Steppenwolf' a lot. Siddhartha has an unusual depth for the topic it tackles, namely achievement and meaning. Highly recommend, and the best part—it is free!

[1] https://bubblin.io/cover/siddhartha-by-hermann-hesse

Says a lot about risk taking and potential rewards. It's short enough to read in one sitting, but more importantly, picking up a book like that reminds me why the world needs more risk takers.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/How-Fight-Hydra-Ambitions-Destined-eb...

- The Structure of Magic

- The Game by Neil Strauss

- Antifragile

- How to win friends and influence people

- 48 Laws of Power

- E-Myth

- Field Guide To Lucid Dreaming

- Turtle Trader by Michael Covel

Structure of magic may be the most impactful one out of all of them, but they are all hella good.

Great book about our how humans think. He breaks our slow, logical reasoning as system 2, and our fast, automatic visceral processing. He points out we might think we have control over our thoughts and actions (system 1), but more often than not our System 1 is intervening or providing the true reasoning for our decisions. Great book to introspect your decision making and that of others.

- I read Brave New World (Huxley) when I was young, and it didn't have such a strong impression on me at the time, but it has strongly influenced some of my political takes over my whole life.

- The four steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank) showed me that there can be method to the apparent madness that is entrepreneurship.

Like many "radicals" (it's the same for libertarians), he has great observations about the way things are, but umconvincing ideas for solutions. Oh well.

It lays out the inevitable power dynamics behind any political system, democratic, autocratic or corporate. The rules for the players are the same, despite different terrain.

If anyone thinks politics can ever really be about policy (for politicians) here is the cure. What has to be done to get power, hold on to it, and why, regardless of motives or competence.

I would add Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman. It too follows the thread of incentives, but also more interesting aspects of human psychology like memory, and the 2 parts of the brain. Understanding how the 2 parts of the brain are often at odds with other, has vastly changed the way I think and helped me realize times I'm susceptible to bias and misunderstanding.

- Models: Attract Women through Honesty + The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson

- The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy + More than Two by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert + Opening Up by Tristan Taormino

The book takes music theory as its subject, but explores perception, culture, the meaning of art, innovation, and other related ideas in its lengthy footnotes and tangents. It shows a world of practical considerations that go into art, which many would assume is primarily subjective.

Schoenberg is known as a composer for exploring atonality, and for having many students who became important composers.

New author, new view of the world - literally hanging yourself upside down to see a new viewpoint.

https://www.amazon.com/HANGED-MAN-M-PFEFFER/dp/0960055118/re...

The ideas in this 20-year-old book are just starting to catch traction, but basically it's that depression manifests differently in men than in women. This is because, the book's thesis goes, of the differences in social conditioning between men and women.

I recommend this book all the time.

1. The first book I read that changed my view of my own mind, that is, taught me to "think about thinking", was Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. I truly felt like my view of myself and the world I live in changed dramatically.

2. The second book that had a huge impact on me was Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky.

3. The third book has to be The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Alexander Solzhenitsyn (the abridged version by Edward E Ericson, Jr). When I mention this book, I meet a lot of people instantly debating the death toll numbers presented by Solzhenitsyn, but for me, the main point of the book is about complicity in the context of the Stalinist regime and complicity in evildoing more generally.

There are a few anecdotes there as well, but it's less fun than Freakonomics. Still, it explains so much about institutions, governing, and generally how societies work. It does make you rethink everything.

I was raised in a culture where if someone has luxury items, a big house, and an expensive car, then they were rich.

The Millionaire Next Door defined wealth in a different way for me. Wealth was no longer how high your income was, but wealth become how long you could live without working. You can increase your wealth by saving/investing more and by lowering your expenses.

* Sapians - great for a global view of our history, and an understanding of how important myths and religions have been for us being successful (as protocols for getting on)

* Thinking in Systems - toolchest of mental models for dealing with complex systems

I found there were some very interesting and useful insights into the way our brain works. Disclaimer, I am only 2/3 the way through it.

* The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt

* 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey

* The Emperor of all Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee

* The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

* Getting Things Done - David Allen

* The Worthing Saga - Orson Scott Card

* The 4-Hour Work Week - Timothy Ferriss

* The 5 Love Languages - Gary Chapman

* The Total Money Makeover - Dave Ramsey

It was really an attitude change for me, and realising that I can only control what I can. I can't control people's reactions to that. It set me off on a bit more reading into stoicism.

Very challenging book. Not recommended for the feint of heart, easily offended, or closed-minded.

The Feynman Processor (Gerard J. Milburn)

Strategy: A History (Lawrence Freedman)

Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People by Thurman Wilkins

Also the NVC book and Walden that have been mentioned.

It changed my mind completely on the fact that being a millionaire is actually attainable. And these are all average Joes!

I read it not so much as a historical text but as a story about dramatic shifts in power attributed to technological advancement and strategy.

Amazing works of fiction that I come back to again and again include Anna Karenina and The Three Musketeers

A great introduction.

One of the most practical books I have read which you can easily implement in your real life to see positive outcome.

https://www.amazon.com/Compound-Effect-Darren-Hardy/dp/15931...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

"On The Road" by Jack Kerouac was a liberating, mind-expanding experience with no drugs involved. Kerouac's free-form style and open-ended approach to life made a great impression.

"Cosmic Loom" by Dennis Elwell debunked the narrow-minded, reductionist attitudes of scientists towards astrology and opened up my mind to the value of symbolism.

His other books are very good as well, "only yesterday", "since yesterday", and "the rise of the 1%".

This book really helped me see the cyclical nature of economics.

It made me understand just how much of what I was raised believing about the history of the US was just plain mythology. It also explained why I always hated US History in school...

https://www.amazon.com/HANGED-MAN-M-PFEFFER/dp/0960055118/re...

misc. Forrest Mims notebooks, the Python Tutorial, Practical C Programming

first chapter of Sound and the Fury, snippets of Naked Lunch, wide swaths of Ulysses

The Universe in a Nutshell, French's Special Relativity

The Gamma Function, a graph theory text whose name i don't remember, baby Rudin

Brain Structure and Its Origins, The Form Within

There are plenty of good reads here already but for posterity I am going to add Edward Abbey to the list. His work is a primer on what freedom is really about rather than this 'freedom' word bandied about by politicians. His work was also important to the environmental movement.

Changed my view on business and reproducible business systems forever. Fun to read, too.

  - *The Selfish Gene* by Richard Dawkins

  - *The Righteous Mind* by Jonathan Haidt

  - *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman

  - *The Art of Not Being Governed* by James C. Scott

  - *The Unwinding* by George Packer

  - *People's History of the United States* by Howard Zinn

  - *East of Eden* by John Steinbeck

  - *Sometimes a Great Notion* by Ken Kesey

  - *The Brothers Karamazov* by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

People could get different takeaways, but it made me think very deeply about falsifiability, the limits of persuasion, and the thin lines between plausible, reasonable, and likely theories about the world.

Doing the experiments contained within some of his books will take you on a very rational, sensible journey to some very strange places, and may break parts of your worldview.

https://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Re...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness

Amazing insights on the corruption of the USG/Nixon And the ties between the unions/cia/and the mafia.

These made me realized how much control I can have on my life.

To sum all that up for you using my own words: If I die tomorrow, I’ll make today the most meaningful day of my life. Rinse and repeat.

Beautiful book, full of wisdom. It's short but I had to read it multiple times (and I'll probably read it many times more, each time discovering something new and deeper and relevant to my current state of play).

When I was younger, On The Road and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning opened my mind to travel and wandering.

Stranger in a Strange land: "Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."

It turned out to be better than it looked. I highly recommend it.

ISBN: 0071433864

This book really highlighted for me how we literally rewrite history to suit our own prejudices, and finally taught me what "history is written by the victor" actually means (including claiming victory).

Set in occupied France during World War II, the novel centers on a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths eventually cross.

It’s a nice reminder on how to treat people.

It's written by someone who lives violence on an everyday basis, and his insights are amazing. Particularly for people who rarely experience violence, but when they do it will be catastrophic.

[1]https://www.ynharari.com/book/homo-deus/

Changed my perception about the state, our society, people's beliefs and media's influence. I was fascinated how Orwell was able to accurately portray the characteristics of totalitarian and authoritarian states.

2. How to stop worrying and start living by Dale Carnegie - made me to survive few odd situations

Completely changed my mind on economics, how it relates to people, and what fulfilling work is. I can't recommend it enough.

That book offers excellent insight into the stupidity of crowds and how that plays into geopolitics, and more.

1) love is a verb and 2) people want appreciation in different ways and 3) people give what they want to receive

It applies to every kind of relationship: lovers, parenting, business, etc.

Tense Present by David Foster Wallace: https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...

This really changed how I think about communication and language, which is used for everything.

Abolition of Work by Bob Black http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm

This essay persuaded me to change a belief which was previously core to my belief system: that work is an inherent good. I don't think that his view of an ideal society is entirely realistic now, but as technology replaces jobs, I see Bob Black's vision of productive play to be a lot more palatable than slavishly continuing the capitalist obsession with work as work becomes more and more unnecessary.

Once I came understand that human beings are survival machines built for the single minded task of gene survival, everyone’s behavior become much more predictable.

* Human, too human, by Frederick Nietzsche ;

* The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris ;

* La Femme est le propre de l'homme, by Rolf Schappi ;

* Biologie de la mort, by Frederik Revah ;

* The Manipulated Man, by Esther Vilar ;

I read it when I was a teenager and it helped me to overcome everyday drama and widely extend limits of my personality.

Fiction: Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut and Ender’s Game by Card have been transformative.

One can't really summarize the argument. It essentially describes the structure of modern society as it's existed since, say 1960 or early. The text may seem opaque but if you read it closely, you actually need any explanatory texts, though they exist.

Honorable mention: Game Theory Evolving, Herb Ginitus Biochemical Individuality, Roger J. William The Working Brain, Luria Using Your Brain For A Change, Bandler The User Illusion, Norretrander How The Beattles Destroyed Rock And Roll, Elijah Wald Mathematical Logic, Manin The Ascent Of Man, Bronowski The Book Of Secrets, Osho

[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.ht...

The first chapter especially blew my socks off. I never have been able to see nature and man's relation to it in the same way after that.

Now everyone I look at reminds me of a monkey.

Practical Primers on Political Power - now I think of EVERYTHING in terms of selectorate theory and cartels

It changed how I think about identity by showing me the danger of labels, and made me appreciate the beauty of life.

General non-fiction: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds; http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518

It's surprisingly relevant today and many of the anecdotes are fun. Helps you have a healthy skepticism but also acceptance of fads.

Fiction: Pratchett. Hilarious and deeply humanist at the same time.

Fiction and politics: Ian M Banks; fully automatic luxury space anarcho-liberalism. With lasers.

I was raised in a super religious house; for whatever reason, that one or two books started my down a path of materialism/skepticism and away from religiosity/dualism/spiritualism. It was just the start, mind you. I was probably already primed and heading that way anyway, and that just happened to be the spark. I don't mean that there were any huge insights or great revelations for me there.

It helped me think about my time spent in relationships and how should I address my sorting problem under constraints of time

All of these portray the world as a series of systems. First deals with interconnected systems like war, business, conflict, the second the notion that culture itself is a series of systems of power and sexuality has been used as a system of power, and third that most of our thought can be made from simpler set of blocks i.e metaphors from which we construct almost all of existence.

1. The Technological Society - Jacques Ellul

2. The Sickness Unto Death - Kierkegaard

3. Dubliners - James Joyce

4. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport

Finally human behaviour makes perfect sense.

Was brought up in a very toxicly pop-libertarian household, and it really opened my eyes to how much all of nature (including human culture more specifically) depends on working together towards common goals.

I was very young and impressionable and I think this book is like philosophical crack cocaine.

Then again I've got no excuse not to be.

It's even more easy to watch the speech itself on Youtube, ofcourse.

A lot of my managerial lessons have come from that book.

2. Dale Carnegie - How to Win Friends and Influence People. The definitive guidebook to interpersonal relations. Taught me empathy.

3. Thornton Wilder - Our Town. A play about a little girl who gets one more day after her death to visit her memories. I read it at 16 and it brought me to my first understanding of mortality.

4. Peter Watts - Blindsight. A romping and intellectually trusting sci-fi involving space vampires. Good biology. Made me seriously question the nature of consciousness.

5. Eric Hoffer - The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Dense and hard to get through old book on what it says in the title. Helped me better understand the Trump movement and similar nazi/alt-right movements that were beyond my ability to grasp before.

6. Douglas Adams - The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Helped me understand that though I may die (or the universe may end), that might be OK.

- Never Split the Difference

- From Zero to One

- Way of the Peaceful Warrior

- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

- Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

No limits, Jonathan? he thought, and he smiled. His race to learn had begun.

Autobiography of a Yogi

The Design of Everyday Things.

I cannot write a glowing praise of it. On paper, it is an awful book, because it contains a textbook but it is trying to be a novel, and so you have to roll your eye when the main character takes the physicist's advice and suddenly his business life and relationships are all sailing smoothly. Even worse: the mathematical derivation that it provides is performed in a context of a steady demand for named products, a manufacturing context, and so it has almost no value in the software engineering "project context" that most of us face, where everything we produce is essentially different from everything else we produce. To understand that you have to read a sequel called Critical Chain, but that sequel is written even worse: at least with The Goal you could imagine yourself as a brave manager finding "Herbies" and putting them "at the front of the troop." But the sequel is just a textbook that has been artificially forced into anecdotal form.

Nevertheless, the points covered by the textbooks deeply changed my view of my purpose at my company and beyond. The essential thesis is that we commit a fallacy: everyone knows the basic accounting knowledge "profit is revenue minus cost" and that the point is to generate more profit, but the fallacy is to assume "there's nothing that I can do to change revenue, that's the job of sales, so the way to maximize profit is to reduce cost, so we will cut costs across the company and then we will be extremely profitable." And it doesn't work! At least, not consistently. What follows is a failure of the greedy algorithm: to improve the efficiency of the system, the greedy algorithm says that you make every single part more efficient, and this is also precisely wrong. The result means that you lose a certain sort of robustness against catastrophe that anyone who has gotten good at backgammon can tell you all about: beginners, who play every move safe, systematically make "good luck" impossible and "bad luck" inevitable: and so they are routinely beaten by the masters who seem to have bad luck all the way until some run of amazing luck causes them to make up their loss and more.

As a consequence you create a circumstance where, as Eli puts it, the entire shop has three priority levels: "hot, red hot, and DO IT NOW". You create a circumstance of "end of the month syndrome": you start every month cutting costs and then you end every month throwing away these lofty ideals in order to meet overdue deadlines and save some customers who are getting mighty irate with you.

All of these are failures to understand that what we'd now call velocity in fact just is profit. With a bit of help from my econ course back at Cornell, most systems can be described with an "order queue" and each order can be associated with its marginal revenue and a marginal cost. You may have to be creative to uncover these in some contexts, for example marginal revenue for a software team at a mechanical contractor may be "paid for" in some "cost savings" for the contractor as a whole in an informal "this is why we keep you programmers around!" type of situation. Marginal cost, similarly, requires being very careful to say "no, I am not going to count my programmers' time in that, unless I really intend on hiring them specially like contractors for this order and only this order." Generally labor, like the building that you are occupying, is a fixed cost.

The velocity of something in the order queue is just the reciprocal of the lead time that it spends in the order queue, and each item in the order queue represents a marginal profit, and your profit comes from creating as much marginal profit as fast as possible -- hence from increasing velocity as much as possible. Furthermore the only reason to prioritize things in that order queue is if you are accepting orders of negative marginal profit and you intend those orders to eventually get cancelled by their recipient -- in the typical case you can mostly ignore all scheduling optimizations and just take orders first-come first-served.

So what you're looking at is a sort of physics about how your organization makes money, and about through my second read-through I started to see how that needed to change my own professional behavior and how I could help my companies to do better. And it's just gone beyond my professional life into thinking about how to increase my throughput of things that make me happy, how to increase my throughput in household chores, how to increase my spiritual throughput. There's a sort of nice ubiquity to any sort of physics.

* Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

* Discipline Equals Freedom by Willink Jocko

Completely shaped my worldview from 13 to now.

In particular his focus on the structures of every day life:

https://www.amazon.com/Structures-Everyday-Life-Civilization...

And his focus on the importance of trade among the different parts of the world:

https://www.amazon.com/Perspective-World-Civilization-Capita...

More here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Braudel

Writing thoughts down changes everything.

2) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

I also read another great book that talked about differences between conservative, liberal, and libertarian viewpoints, with a notion of different taste buds that are active when observing the world that was really interesting, but unfortunately, the name escapes me.

Les Miserables, Hugo

Several stories by Kafka

Dubliners, Joyce

Walden by Emerson

Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter

My own interpretation is that while we can say "I think therefore I am" you can't really prove anything else. The tao takes it some small step further: There exists you, but there also exists everything which isn't you (even if that's nothing). So, in other words the existence of A implies the existence of not-A, even if that's the empty set. Between A and not-A there is a boundary where you transition from A to not-A. In other words, by implying the existence of one thing, you imply the existence of 3 things, even if 2 of them are the empty set.

This turns out to be really handy. If you say "tall", it implies "short" (not-tall) and it even implies that there is a point between "tall" and "short" where it transitions from one to the other. This is actually a tautology, based on the definitions of the words, but it can be used as a base of reasoning. The classic example is that a cup can be empty or it can be full. A cup that is always empty is not useful, and neither is a cup that is always full (for the normal definition of "useful" when applied to a "cup"). It has to transition between empty and full for it to be "useful". Similarly, a spoke in a wheel is defined as much by the places where it isn't as it is by the place where it is. You can't have a spoke without a space and when you think about spokes, you should also think about the spaces between the spokes because they are just as important. Or if you don't want criminals, one easy way of accomplishing it is by getting rid of laws -- no laws, no criminals. More laws, more criminals. This is just reasoning based on the tautological definitions of words, but it can lead you to pretty interesting insights.

The I Ching is interesting because it documents 64 states that you could possibly be in. It then describes all the transitions between the states. There are consequences for moving from one state to another. The consequences are described in those transitions. It is surprisingly apropos! Though it was supposed to have been written by the Yellow Emperor thousands of years ago, in reality I think it's been tweaked over and over again for thousands of years and the 4096 different possible transitions have just been worked out by exhaustion.

Many people think of it as a fortune telling thing and you can roll dice (or draw straws) to pick a starting condition and the transitions, but my impression is that this was originally a study mechanism. In fact, it's not a book you can easily read through. Randomly selecting a starting condition and transitions allows you to study one thing at a time. I still haven't gotten through everything :-) Basically, I think of the I Ching as design patterns for life. I'm here. I want to go there. What is the best way to go about it and what are the likely consequences of those actions? Very useful.

The Bible being profound to people isn't anything new to people, but it was in particular the writings by these men that deepened it for me, solidified it, I don't know what was it. Maybe it was because I was a functioning agnostic the entire time I was brought up, it just made it that much more real to me. I can't really put my finger on it, but that was the experience I had.

For my non-cliche picks, starting with "Mindset" by Carol Dweck. Particular the a-ha moment here was the dichotomy between the "fixed" mindset and "growth" mindset. Shedding the notion that we were "fixed" in our ways. The particular example that resonated the most with me was the one about Michael Jordan. How I used to remember so many people saying "he was born with that talent" or "it was a gift from God"

No the gift was not his talents, it was his work ethic and determination. To find out he was actually cut from his high school varsity team at 15. To hear the stories of how he practiced so determined (and took great offense if his team mates didn't take practice as seriously as he did, sometimes to the detriment to some relationships), it just changed my whole perspective. I was going through a tough time of my own at work, and this book allowed me to realize that the feedback I was getting wasn't attacks against my character or meant I wasn't smart enough or good enough, they just were what they were, and they were opportunities to grow. Everything can be malleable with enough time, energy, focus, and most importantly, the right mindset.

A follow up to this in a tangential way was "The Obstacle is the Way" which really helped me learn how to roll with the punches, and turn everything into an opportunity, a challenge. If something wasn't fair, wasn't right, seemed impossible, it didn't become my destruction, it became my motivation.

Finally, for leadership, and kind of along that same theme of rolling with the punches and stop buying into the "life isn't fair" or "I got a unfair shake" was Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Lief Babin. The book details the stories of the Navy Seals that fought in the Battle of Ramadi in 2005-2006. Most people will be particularly interested in the chapter about Chris Kyle of "American Sniper" fame, as he was part of this Navy Seal unit.

Besides the awesome stories, the book details a great mindset for ownership and leadership in general. Teaches you how to ditch the word "they" when referring to other people in your organization (I found myself often complaining that things were more difficult than they needed to be, often using the word "they" when describing who exactly was making my life difficult). It helps you realize your part of the bargain when it comes to your organization's success.

I also recently discovered Stoicism and there seems to be a relation (albeit weak one) between Objectivism and Stoicism.

"The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch. It's difficult to pinpoint this book as being about a thing or a set of things, but my best attempt is to say it's about attaining knowledge and the non-existent limits to human knowledge. I've never felt more inspired than when I finished reading this book and reflected on the infinite lengths humankind has to go on technological progress. Overall, it's an incredible argument for optimism about what is possible.

Before I read it, I thought anarchism was just punk-ish people who want to run around Mad Max style with no rules. Reading The Dispossessed helped me to see it's actually a fully fleshed out political system, with many rules, that could work well.

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter; recursion.

In fiction, Gene Wolfe (Severian) and Doris Lessing (Shikasta) have rewired a considerable number of my synapses. To this day they tug at my subconscious.

* Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

* The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

* Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

* Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz

* Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

* Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

* The Culture novels by Ian M. Banks

* Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

* Not a book, but Gene Roddenberry's vision in Star Trek shaped who I want to be and the world in which I prefer to live.

Although, I would say that it's hard to choose because just about everything I read changes me in some way. Here I've tried to stick to the ones that changed me for the better, rather than sending me off on an amusing if useless rabbit trail, e.g. Real Magic by Isaac Bonewitz, Illusions by Richard Bach, The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, H.P. Lovecraft's works.

Another was Nineteen Eighty Four by Orwell.

I'd also cite The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand as having influenced me, although I read it when I was older and found that it mostly reinforced ideas that I was already sympathetic towards. Similar situation with Atlas Shrugged, also by Rand.

I could probably also call out The Soul of a New Machine by Kidder, as being a primary influence that pushed me in the direction of getting involved with computers.

"Debt: The First 5000 Years": This is truly a magnum opus. Until I read this I had taken money, economy, market etc., for granted. And I had held onto the widely accepted, but naive, view that economic systems somehow grew out of barter systems. The range of topics discussed, and the way author shows how seemingly independent concepts are intertwined, is truly astonishing. I'm on my 2nd read.

"Thinking, Fast and Slow": This book made me truly appreciate the value of psychology. I didn't even know the existence of a vast domain called behavioral science until I read this book. Now I'm deliberately conscious about the decisions I take and retrace my thought process multiple times just to make sure that I haven't fallen pray to some of the cognitive biases.

"The Tell-Tale Brain": While I did know that human brain is a unique organ this book opened my eyes to its layered complexities. For instance, how "seeing" is not a single step but a multi step process. From image formation, to identifying the object, to evoking emotional response.

"QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter": The book with the highest signal to noise ratio. I finally understood what science is about, a way to model nature and to keep refining it to fit the observation. There are no true/false theories/models only those that explain nature's behavior better or worse. Nature is agnostic to all our theories and models. She's just the way she is. For details read about double slit experiment.

"How the World Works": This one along with "Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order" has greatly shaped my mental model about the workings of contemporary world. I now understand why does military gets all the funding, why do powerful governments tend to keep its subject under perpetual fear, why is it that the cost of education has been sky-rocketing.

"The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament": A glimpse into the working of Indian justice system.

"Broken Republic": This is by far the most accurate description about current affairs in India. How India is being hollowed out and how its most vulnerable section is the one fighting against it.

"Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life": I'm currently reading it (20% through) and it has already made a big impact. The meaning of information is deep and subtle and pervades not just human being but the life itself.

"The Order of Time": The book that well and truly shook the foundation that I had taken for granted for my entire life. That space and time aren't something absolute and are personal has had a profound impact on me.

"The Upanisads": A truly remarkable work of human mind. Just to think about some of the concepts uplifts my mood.

Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche. I picked it up knowing nothing but Nietzsche was the progenitor of the saying 'that which does not kill you makes you stronger' (which is a radically misunderstood saying that is supposed to sound naive and stupid). Then I read the chapter titles. "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", "Why I Write Such Great Books". I had to read it. It sounded ludicrous from the table of contents alone. And so it was. I later found out that he wrote the book while in the end stages of syphillis, mostly insane. It did, however, clue me in to a whole different kind of thinking by introducing me to philosophy and how problems could be tackled that can't be addressed through more analytical means. Plus, it is full of a great many laughs simply due to the absurdity. The only thing I can recall actually making sense and being true was a bit about how to be most like ones parents is the greatest disgrace because it indicates that humanity has stagnated and not advanced for your generation at least.

And though I don't care for it now, Ayn Rand's works, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, had great impact on me at the time I read them. I went on to read all of Rand's non-fiction philosophical writings as well. It was thanks to her that when I attended college, I majored not just in Computer Science, but also in Philosophy. And I credit that education with granting me a tremendous amount of insight and philosophical confidence. Today I would vigorously disagree with many of Rand's shortsighted conclusions, and even with her physically incorrect epistemology, but she did have a grand idea after all, to derive all of philosophy from first principles. Shame she started with the wrong principles and A is indeed often not A but a superposition of A and B. Beyond that, the modern Objectivist community seems to lack a great deal of the intellectual mettle that I think she herself had, and they seem incapable of letting go of the seemingly helpful flawed evidence of the past and embracing the more sound modern evidence of the benefits and evolutionary advantage of empathy and such. I could go on for hours about how Rand actually DID account for things like charity and supported them, but it's a nuanced discussion and not for a thread like this.

Also, the hardest book to read I have ever read, Comprehensive Mathematics For Computer Scientists. It derives mathematics from set theory on up. It is written like a single books-long (there are multiple volumes) academic paper and if you're not accustomed to reading such information-dense material, it might well be impenetrable. It took me days per page to fully comprehend, often with breaks in between. But it gave me interesting perspectives on at least functional programming and infinity and how to prove things.

But that goes for pretty much everything really. Catcher in the Rye in high school. Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People".

I think books can "change the way you think about almost everything" when you are younger, naive and idealistic. As you grow older, wiser and understand the world more, you leave those childish things behind.

Also, as einstein said : "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."

I'm sure I'm not the only one that used reading as a crutch and a form of escapism and to waste time.

But if you want a book that left an impression on me, K&R's C Programming Language is one. It showed me that a technical book can be concise, well written and enjoyable to read.

Of those five books, "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" by Gabor Mate changed me the most. I actually re-read portions of the book last night.

Practical effect: you'll start seeing your favourite cereals as an entirely indistinct product, with a cardboard box around, with coloured print over it which has no connection whatsoever with the content.

The question itself is kind of absurd if you think about it. But it leads to a nice parade of skimmed and unread books. Sorry, if I'm too cynical. I just have seen these questions about books thousand of times and every time I have the same feeling: that people are grossly overestimating the impact of the books they have read and they are just approval junkies. Surely, no book can change your thinking about almost everything.

It's quite interesting that people love the concept of "favourite books". Any time there is a question about our favourite books we feel the urge to share and tell everyone what great books we have read. It's not important what others have read, main thing is to shout out our title.

I still haven't figured out why we love to discuss books so much. Is it egoism or need for approval? Is it because we have to somehow justify hundreds of books we have bought and never actually read? Books become elements of decoration, just to show off and appear smarter perhaps. If they are stacked on the edge of your desk, that's even better, it portraits you as a restless intellectual adventurer. And when your guests arrive you make sure that they get a glimpse of your amazing "library". And some of the guest who kind of dabble in books themselves, are happy to look at your books, skim them, and make some general remarks. Win-win. I'm sure you guys can relate.

This led me to read other authors like Sam Harris and Daniel Dennet. Helps me identify the influence of religion in nearly every aspect of life.

[1] https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/For%20a%20New%20Liberty... [2] https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/The%20Ethics%20of%20Lib...

"Wait a minute--this Snow Crash thing, is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"

"What's the difference?"

This was the original definition of a "meme" as coined by Richard Dawkins: instead of humans choosing what to think, what if ideas self-replicate using human minds as hosts? Religions, languages, agriculture, chemistry, the word "like", uptalk, literally any thought or behavior pattern can be framed this way.

See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

He argues that anyones decisions are a direct result of the physical structure of their respective brain, which in turn is moulded by their genes and experience so far, rather than a by an unexplainable free will.

The book made me reconsider how people treat each other because of their beliefs and actions - from harbouring negative feelings towards somebody due to their opinions to locking up people for committing crimes.

At the very least it has helped me in personal relationships and encouraged me to try to understand where another persons opposing viewpoint is coming from rather than feel negativity or superiority towards them because I feel they are wrong.